I personally don't have a hate on for the raptor drives, my issue with them is usually price point. Last time I bought spindle drives for myself was right before the price hikes. You could buy a 2TB for roughly $60-70 and then turn around and buy a decent SSD for 100-150 for your OS. So at this point is cost is a factor you just bought 2TB and a say 60GB SSD for $160 and had loads of space and a stupid fast OS and program drive. The raptors have been too much for what you get since SSDs. You had lower then SSD performance and less space then a massive spindle drive. I did use two 36GB raptors when they first came out in RAID 0, and it was fast at the time.... But for the same money I can do a lot more now. They need to lower the price of the drives to compete.

Lastly burst rarely happens, where the SSD excels is latency and small file transfers. if you compare that the raptor is far less of a competitor to the SSD. There are articles pointing this out or more knowledgeable people on this forum then myself that can go into detail.